


Lister's Conception

by Fluffywok



Category: Red Dwarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-21 07:04:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16571921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluffywok/pseuds/Fluffywok
Summary: Set mid Ouroboros (Series 7). The act that creates David Lister is committed along with all the emotional angst and inadequate masturbation material this entails.





	Lister's Conception

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cazflibs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cazflibs/gifts).



It was too bright in the medibay. Obviously it had to be bright, stood to reason really - you don’t want someone wielding scalpels or needles in and around your delicate squishy bits without seeing what was going on. Made sense if you thought about it. 

 

Lister drummed his fingers on the edge of the bed, itself lit up like a Mimian billboard and covered in enough buttons to set Rimmer’s pulse racing. The brightness was what was making him uncomfortable probably. Yeah, almost definitely. He was used to doing this in the dark, when the only light available to see was the green glow of LED clock numbers and the grey screens of monitors on standby late at night. He was missing the tissue thin mattress of his bunk below him and the reassuringly familiar pattern of rivets and scuffs on the painted steel above him. 

 

It was an association thing - the bright light and antiseptic smell of bleach reminded him of the many times he had been laid up injured or sick, feeling like utter crap. How could he seriously concentrate on the task at hand in those circumstances? 

 

He shook his head, a nervous little gesture. No use beating about the bush, just get on with it. He half-prepared to lie down but even as he started to raise his leg to swing it up on to the bed he put it down again, a wave of indecision and nervousness clawing at his guts. 

 

The pervasive sound of the air recyclers was bearing down at him in the otherwise quiet room. He wasn’t used to being in here when there wasn’t a crisis going on or outside of a medical checkup. It was disconcerting being here alone.The room was alien; the banks of machinery, the intensely organised trolleys and shelves filled to the brim with bottles, tubes, sterile plastic wrappers and bits of plastic in regimented primary color codes...all of it seemed to be crowding in on him. He felt isolated and exposed, part of him expecting Kryten to waddle in at any second. He checked the lock was engaged on the door for the fifth time and sat down again. 

 

Lister glanced down at the tray on the trolley in front of him, the mirror bright steel below the plastic tube. The tube gave off a low hum, a high tech piece of medical equipment that constantly monitored the condition of its content and adjusted the temperature and chemical environment accordingly. Amazing really. 

 

And that stood to reason as well, he thought to himself. It was far better to do things this way, wasn’t it? I mean, who needed all that unnecessary effort and complication, the potential for something to go wrong, when there was a sensible and practical way to alleviate the risks associated with all of that. She had added her part and it was a far simpler and painless matter for him to just -

 

He stood abruptly and started to pace the few steps of the medibay and back, resolutely not looking at the little gizmo with its quietly patient purr. 

 

He had no idea how long he’d been in there, how long it had been since the linkway had been established and the transfer of cargo between the two craft had started. He was going to help at first - another pair of hands to shift the crates - until she’d gently reminded him that if he hadn’t yet done his part with the in-vitro tube, now was the time. He’d grinned and asked for a kiss for luck, receiving a chaste peck on the cheek. Not the luck he’d been looking for but typical of this whole bloody situation really.

 

He’d ducked back to the Sleeping Quarters and grabbed whatever he could think of to, well, help matters. Visual aids, he supposed. It wasn’t like he needed them, most of the time he had no problem in getting things going by just using a combination of recollection and imagination to build a perfectly detailed erotic tableau. He'd never had a problem in getting the motor running, as it were. Of course, this was the furthest from his usual set-up as it was physically possible to be. 

 

Lister studied the collection of objects on the workbench. Item one: a heavily dog-eared and slightly water-damaged lifestyle magazine entitled “Houseproud”. It was filled with banal features on non-spicy food, the housing market on the Saturnian moons and various wholesome corporate propaganda. All the images showed very decently dressed women in non-provocative poses, smiling wistfully at children with tied shoelaces and well brushed hair, or garnished plates of nutritious salad. 

 

He thumbed through it idly, in case he had missed a feature on exotic lingerie or bondage wear for the discerning housewife but alas, only recipes and coma-inducing discussions about wine choices. He tossed it in one smooth motion into the medical waste bin six feet away with a satisfying thud.

 

Item two: one video entitled “Baked Bean Bombshells Vol: 7”. He had found it in McIntyre’s quarters back on the ‘Dwarf, probably bought on Mimas. Of the series, he felt it was one of the weaker in terms of plotline and production values but made up for it with the royal rumble match in the finale. The cover just featured the title in jagged neon green lettering with no ‘teaser’ pictures or blurb. Lister shrugged, opened the case, looked about the medibay for a video player, sighed and then put the video back in the case. 

 

Item three: four audio tape cartridges, all that they had left on board. Between the initial loss of the ‘Dwarf and the various fires and floods on board the ‘Bug, most of the extensive library he had bought or purloined over the years had been lost to the ether. All that remained were Rasta Billy Skank’s second album “Back Your Treads Offa My Dredds”, a spoken word book of “Biggles and the Pirate Treasure” and two of Rimmer’s James Last albums - “Caribbean Nights” and “Electro up to Date”. 

 

Lister looked around again. No tape deck. He sighed and looked at each album cover in turn, his heart briefly surging at the sight of the full exposed breasts on the cover of “Caribbean Nights” before sinking once more as he noticed the pair of stickers placed precisely over each nipple on the cardboard case of the disc. 

 

“Who the smeg would put - ” he murmured aloud until after a closer inspection, he recognised the square boxy logo of an 8 bit pixel heart with a cross through it - the symbol of the Love Celibates. Smegging Rimmer. Who else would have ruined a perfectly decent image of a pair of breasts but still leave exposed the face of James Last, cheekily hanging on the medallion nestled between them. Lister half-heartedly tried to pick away the sticker covering the image of the left nipple but he stopped at the quiet scrunch of ripping paper - the image refusing to peel away from the sticker and tearing the case in the act. Disgusted, he threw the box down. 

 

So that left “Electro up to Date” - the cover featured an elderly and hologrammatic James dancing arthritically with a girl of about 19 in a vibrantly yellow crocheted waistcoat top and miniskirt, tiny dots of red shining through her cycling shorts and sports-bra beneath. The image was roughly three inches high but by squinting he could make out a pleasant enough face, eyes closed as if enthralled by the easy listening, smooth melody big band cover version of “White Lines (Don’t Do It)”. 

 

His initial thought - that she looked like she was possibly under the influence of powerful narcotics - he forcibly pushed aside, trying instead to focus on the physical allure of her body alone, the curve of her silhouette, the tiny sliver of the curve of her left breast just visible past her arm, raised up for balance as she did the twist.  

 

It was the best he had to work with, so he guessed there was no use in doing any more waiting. Lister jumped up and down on the spot, shaking his hands, loosening up like he was about to jet up to the Zero G scrim bar. He could do this, easy. It was simple mechanics really, when you get down to it. You grasp yourself like so, provide some vigorous movement and in a matter of minutes you get -

 

Except it wasn’t like that he realised with a heavy heart, not really. There was only two ways where the end result of this process was natural and comfortable - in a shared moment of intimate pleasure with a loved one curled up near you or secretly, guiltily giving oneself release from the compounded pressure of biological need. He felt neither lustful arousal or a desperate need for any “alone time”. He felt like he should be a vital and necessary part of the crew, unloading the newly arrived cargo or shouting out unhelpful suggestions to his alternate self. Instead he had been exiled to a corner to do something intimate as if it was some kind of procedure - like trimming his toenails. Everyone knew what he was doing and was being politely distant or resolutely ignoring him completely. It just didn’t feel right.

 

Lister slumped down dejectedly on the medibed, every hard edge pressing on his spine in horribly familiar ways. As he gazed up at the light array above him, he mentally kicked himself for smiling and no-problem-ing his way into this smegging car crash of a situation. 

 

In what reality did it seem a good idea to just have a baby with his ex? Even when it wasn’t clear on the methodology she had intended to use to create a child, was he that desperate for even the slightest hint of a possibility of sexual contact with a woman that he would disregard reason, logic and even basic sense? 

 

Well yes, yes he was. He hadn’t been touched intimately by another human being in close to a decade in experienced time, never mind the various time travel and time freezing shenanigans that had rendered him separated by near immeasurable years and distance away from any living female of his species. 

 

And this was the cruelest of tricks that fate had pulled on him. The woman he had obsessed over for most of his adult life, the last great chance he had had to secure every one of his dreams of finding belonging and love and purpose and she blows back into his life; utterly beautiful and smart and witty and with nothing but contempt for him. Her easy flirtatious teasing that tied him up in sheepish knots, her sense of humor, her smile that made him want nothing else in the universe than the chance to make her smile like that at him again; it was all gone. This Kochanski was all hard edges and suspicion and cold purpose, nothing like his Kochanski. 

 

Or was she? Three weeks of honeymoon romance when they were both little more than kids and they had had a whole ship of people to hide away from each other was very different to the four rooms and four people that made up the pressure cooker that was Starbug. This Kochanski had awoken to a world where she was the last human alive, lost beyond the wit of man to comprehend. The woman who had charted a way through that to stand before him here and now would have seen and done so much that his Kochanski would never even have dreamed possible. He knew deep in his gut that she probably started out on her journey exactly the same - this Kochanski was exactly as his would have been had he stuck around for a few more weeks instead of succumbing to his crushingly low self-esteem at being dumped to scurry away and hide in stasis - abusing one of the most complicated pieces of temporal machinery devised by humankind for the sole purpose of avoiding his ex. 

 

So yes, a combination of ludicrous optimism, barely restrained libido and generalised idiocy had made him smile and nod and just accept that he would be a part of this insanity. He was going to be the father to a child he would never see. 

 

Was that so bad? It was all just genetic material at the end of the day, he was undertaking his duty as a member of the species to create a new life. Was it as simple as that? 

 

Of course, this might not work at all. When he had been young with the human race gadding about willy nilly and he had been at the peak of his physical prowess the thought that he may be responsible for an infant human life had terrified him. He had girlfriends and did the things boys and girls do who can’t afford to go to the pictures. There had been the odd near miss it was true - always due to his own optimistic stupidity and thoughtlessness - but nevertheless he was pretty sure he had not caused a child to be conceived. 

 

The sudden thought struck that maybe that had not just been “lucky”. Maybe the lack of any children from his multitudinous errors in judgement was not so much luck as the fact he was not producing the goods, as it were. Maybe he couldn’t be a father. 

 

And at that thought was the creeping dread of failure, as a friend to Kristine who had asked this of him but even more so as a human being, as a man. The crushing responsibility of what he needed to do not only for those he loved but for the species as a whole suddenly seemed destined to settle on the pathetic and quite frankly hideous lumps of flesh he was absently holding. God knew how much of their precious content he had wasted over the years, enough to repopulate the ganges delta he had no doubt. How much was left? He had been in deep space on ancient nuclear powered spacecraft leaking unthinkable quantities of radiation, exposed to unknowable pathogens and had his most precious parts battered and bruised by horrific monsters beyond human comprehension. To believe they could survive with their contents intact, and at his age… It was laughable really.

 

No, he couldn’t think like that. This had to work. He wasn’t that old, really. The tubular gizmo would no doubt give his stuff every chance to work it’s magic. And doing that would be the right thing to do. It was the hard wired biological imperative of the species that a male begets his progeny on the closest accepting womb and vanishes. No fuss, no regrets. How was this any different?

 

I mean, his own biological father may well have done just that. He had long ago given up on even visualising who he may have been; both of his ‘real’ parents existed to him in only a mythic way. He supposed if he ever thought about it, Lister reasoned that it was likely his biological mother was unable to raise him and in his wilder imaginings he had assumed that would have been because his father wasn’t there for her. He had no proof of course - the only thing he knew about his parents were that they were indecisive, terrible at spelling and had incredibly poor choice in places to leave a foundling. He’d seen it often enough with the others he had gone through the so called ‘care’ system with - so often it had been the dads who had walked out or failed to step up and take on their responsibilities; why would his dad be any different? In his head, it was his father who had failed his mother, his weakness that had lost their son forever, abandoning a baby to be raised by strangers. 

 

A dull ache in his jaw made him realise that he was grinding his teeth and Lister forced himself to take a calming breath.

 

No, he had to look on the bright side, the people who had ended up raising him were wonderful people in their own right. Poor, bolshy and with huge chips on both shoulders truth be told but decent and honest where it counted. And how much did biology matter when it came right down to it? Lister’s own belief growing up that maybe if his parents had stuck around he wouldn't be as much of a lost and failed specimen of humanity was a myth shattered spectacularly by the evidence of the life of one Arnold Judas Rimmer. Both of Rimmer’s parents had stuck around and been there for him his whole life - a life the young Lister could only see as being the epitome of ‘privileged’. It hadn't done Rimmer any favors though. It was telling, that although Lister had been insulted with the term “orphan” by plenty of people throughout his life it was never even mentioned by Rimmer. True, Rimmer had used every other insult devised by mankind for Lister. It seemed to him that in a perverse way, being an orphan was one of the few things that Rimmer truly envied Lister for. 

 

That was not to say that Lister had grown up fatherless, far from it. There had been an abundance of male role models in his life - some of them had even been in relationships with the mother figures in his life. He thought back to hazy memories, jumbles of confused sensations of warm sunlight and the taste of sour sweets and having to almost jog to keep up with the only man he’d ever call “Dad”. It had been a ritual, a routine - every Sunday they had walked Hannah across the estate and down to the high street newsagents to get a copy of the Liverpool Interstellar and a pack of 30 filter-tip cigarettes. Hannah was a handful, the pitbull cross would be straining at the end of the leash at every squirrel, bird, child or lamppost she wandered within about 50 feet of, but his dad would just whisper a word and she would sit sullenly but obediently. Then he would sit on the bench and slowly read the sports pages, letting “Davy” run himself ragged around the rusty play equipment. 

 

Was that a father’s love? It had seemed enough to him, barely five years old. The closest familial bond he had ever had with a man and not a drop of blood to tie them together. 

 

Dave shook his head, trying to shake off his reluctance with a physical gesture and a determination to try and get an unpleasant task over with. With one hand he unbuttoned the buttons down the front of his flight suit, the other hand rolling the tube between his fingers. How was he meant to catch anything with this damn -

 

There - low on his belly, in a place only deemed publically viewable on a man if it was on a fifty-foot high billboard advertising underpants, was the faintest ghost of a scar. Tracing his little finger along the length as it travelled across his belly, he tried to recall the vague memory attached to it. The recollection was ephemeral but sharp like a fever dream - the wall of pain that seemed unending, the desire for someone, anyone to take it away with drugs or magic or even a bullet if it came to it. 

 

The Caesarean Section. A night of madness, of delirious raving at Holly, at the ham-fisted skutters, at the Cat for refusing to step anywhere near when he needed someone physically present to just support him more than he had needed air. He had fired barrages of expletives at the stunned form of Rimmer who had been hovering in the doorway looking green - too terrified to enter too horrified to run. He had screamed at the absent Deb, at his own stupidity of getting into the mess he was in. A skutter had rolled up at a whirring run jamming a needle into his flailing arm at last, knocking him out cold for the actual procedure. He had finally come round to the screaming of the two little things of pure need wrapped in shiny thermal blankets. 

 

He’d barely been a kid himself. He’d never imagined for a single second what it would have been like to be in that situation, how completely his life concentrated to a single point in space and time. The madly obsessive and fiercely possessive feeling for something that can’t return any of that feeling. Giving so much effort and time and focus on these pudgy lumps with nothing but filth and noise coming back from them - being driven to near insanity by the pressure and sleep deprivation when he had been recovering from nearly dying. And then being saved from the brink of psychotic murder by the little twitch in a tiny face. A single smile of recognition, and it was like the sun had come up after a night of storms. 

 

Three days he’d been a father. He tried not to think about that time too much; the stomach- churning fear when the boys grew at an astronomically alarming rate, the pure terror at the realisation that so soon after they had come into his life, he would have to watch them wither and die before his eyes. The lump in his throat that threatened to choke him as the last image of them burned across his mind’s eye - two beautiful strapping lads on each side of a bemused and terrified Deb. 

 

And it was with that thought he realised he couldn’t do this, what Kochanski had asked of him. He couldn’t lose a child again. It was ridiculous, ludicrous to think he could even have entertained the idea. He may not have to bear the child this time but still, he could be no part of this. 

 

If Lister believed in anything it was Karma. The fact that good things balanced out the bad things in the end had let him keep going one minute at a time, year after year. He knew deep down his life should not have gone this way - he had cheated fate to have a life he should not have had, living when so many others had died. To his thinking that had meant that all of that debt of fortune would all have to be paid off somehow. So fate had taken its dues by giving him a kicking throughout the years - denying him peace and love and family at every turn. It had seemed Krissy had exploded into his life again and that the scales were about to tip back in his favour. Love, companionship, a future. Dave could not afford to piss this chance away for the sake of awkwardness or indescisiveness - this was his future just as much as it was hers and he could never abandon it, not for anything.

 

The hand holding the tube was shaking.

 

He could be a proper father. He would convince Kochanski to stay or he would go with them - come hell or high water he was not stepping out of his child’s life. Not for anything. Other Dave could do whatever the smeg he wanted but Lister was going to be there for his child, their child. 

 

He would bestow upon that little life every single iota of his being. The flashing memory of his boys now long gone seared through his mind and he could feel the sting of unshed tears. He would wash and dress and change them, boy or girl. He would care for their ills, read them stories, sit up through the night to guard their dreams. He’d give up smoking, eat more healthily and live every day of his life for them and their mother. He would give his heart, soul and strength for them, every fiber of his being. All he was, all he had. He would give them everything.

 

A guitar. A jacket. Four audio cartridge tapes and some low budget badly shot pornography. A pudgy wheezy body, a quarter share in a three million year old midget class cargo lander, about twenty six dollarpounds in real money, no marketable skills or knowledge of anything of worth apart from mid 23rd century Zero G football trivia. All he had in the universe. 

 

He rolled the tube slowly back and forth in his fingers, considering. Technology centuries beyond his knowing. His concerns over if it was the right choice, if it would work had been dismissed by her with the simple, “Oh, Dave will be able to set it all up”. 

 

David Lister 2. The other Dave. The man was apparently a genius. A technical wizard. An essential part of her crew, reliable, dependable. She made him sound perfect. 

 

Ace had told him about yet another Dave Lister, how ‘Spanners’ had settled with his Kochanski and their boys. Lister had lied when he’d told Rimmer that all he’d felt was happiness for the guy; that it was all okay, as long as one of the Dave Lister’s out there made it. What he tried not to admit to himself was that it had given him hope that one day it would be his turn to be the lucky one. And at least that time he’d never had to see or speak to the smegger.

 

His grip on the tube became painful, the stainless steel edges around its various input valves digging into the flesh of his palm. He forced himself to relax, unclenching his jaw and slowing his breathing.

 

It wasn't fair. Even as the thought crossed his mind he knew how stupid it sounded. He couldn't help it. He shouldn’t resist this, what he had agreed to do was the right thing - the best thing he could do for them. He was being selfish by refusing - from the child’s point of view it made no difference where the genetic material was from - hell, the genetic material was identical to the man who it would call Dad. Krissie’s Dave was him, in every single way that counted. From what Kochanski had told him, apart from a few very minor details, their lives had run damn near parallel - same upbringing, same schools, same stupid choices. The only differences of note had happened in the time the two of them had travelled together after she had been revived. Right at his core, Krissie’s Dave could have been his twin.

 

He wanted to hate the smug prick, the urbane and pompous tit that had sold out. It would be so easy to just dismiss that other Dave as a chancer, a guy who ditched everything that made him Dave Lister to please people who didn't get him. A “go-getter”, a “team player”. He wanted to shudder.

 

But then, if it had been him trying to keep Kochanski sane, nurturing her through the devastation and loss of everything she had known would he have continued to play the annoying prick? Would he have given up and slobbed about drinking beer milkshakes and onion sandwiches in his long johns? Would he have had the balls to power through and make something of himself? 

 

Maybe if it had made her smile.

 

The realisation dawned on him slowly, reluctantly, like pulling a tooth from his head. He couldn’t be the father that the other Dave could be. The only future he could give his child was of yawning hunger, terrifying danger and empty loneliness - his was a world of bare survival with only the monsters and the broken detritus of machines and mad genetic throwaways for company. The unconditional love and devotion of a burned out space bum at the arse end of the universe would never compare to even the chance of the life Krissie and Other Dave could give them. If Lister could imagine himself as the perfect father it would be as Kochanski’s Dave - wise, patient, kind, sensible. For smeg’s sake - other Dave was practically immortal - there would be no better person in the universe to look after his child or the love of his life. He and Kriss would love and protect that child, raise them and be the parents he could never be. Lister knew Other Dave, that more than anything else in the multiverse he wanted to be a part of a family. And this, what Lister was supposed to be doing at this moment in time, would let that happen for him. It would make all of his hardships, his journey through death and out three million years into deep space dimensions away from Liverpool worthwhile. It would finally give him the family he had earned with the woman he loved. 

 

And for looking after the woman he loved, maybe Lister could do this one thing for him. He owed him that much at least.

 

With a sigh, Lister raised the album cover to his eyeline, took a hold of himself with his right hand, and did what he had come to do. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to all those who managed to get this far. I am aware reading a long stream of consciousness is not everyone's cup of tea but it felt the most natural way to tell this story. 
> 
> This fic came to me as a result of the combination of my relatively recent entry into fatherhood, my own personal experiences of the deeply odd process of medical sample production and the incredibly jarring sequence of events in Ouroboros. It had never sat well with me why Lister, who had wanted nothing more than to spend his entire life with this woman who had crashed back into his life, would give up his child with her. I got that it was himself he put under the pool table and that he was setting up the ultimate loop of humanity in space but the way that the episode was written it crashes through any emotional logic to get to a conclusion. I understand why for the purposes of a sitcom but this fic is my headcannon explored - Lister is not the best father in the universe but he's a tremendous human being, with all the flaws and insecurity that entails. That's what makes him good to write about. 
> 
> This fic is a gift to my wife and soul mate cazflibs, she is my world and incredibly talented. Read her far better stuff on here, it makes her happy.
> 
> Thanks again. Sorry thank you sorry bye sorry thank you bye...


End file.
